Wild Child
The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington
Most of us have a relative with a willful disregard for convention. For Joanna Moorhead it was her father’s cousin Prim, a family nickname that was to prove wildly inappropriate. Better known as the painter Leonora Carrington, she was, before her death in 2011, aged 94, the last surviving member of the Surrealist group of the early 20th century.
In The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington, Moorhead had produced an effective oddity, blending together art history, family memoir and travelogue into a hybrid biography. In the late 1930s, Carrington abandoned her affluent Lancashire family for a bohemian life. Seven decades later, Moorhead turned up at her door in Mexico City to get the full story.
And what a story it is. Carrington was born into privilege, the daughter of wealthy textile merchants. As a debutante she was presented to society at Buckingham Palace, dressed in elegant gowns and danced at The Ritz. None of which impressed her. Aged 20, she ran off with the artist Max Ernst, who was middle-aged, married and German, a trio of outrages for her parents to digest.
It set the standard for what followed. There were other lovers and scandals, periods spent in London, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon and New York before she finally settled down—sort of—in Mexico, where she became something of a national treasure. En route she fled the Nazis in France, was institutionalized in a Spanish asylum, married twice and created an impressive body of work.
While Moorhead is rather soppy on the brief affair with Ernst, who comes across as an unlikeable opportunist, Carrington’s talent as a painter is well recounted. Although overshadowed by Ernst, as was his third wife Dorothea Tanning, Carrington succeeded in creating a distinct style in the English Gothic tradition.
With their tangled gardens, eerie country houses and sinister geese, her works drew more from the book illustrations of Arthur Rackham than the dreamscapes of Dalì. In fact, the most surreal thing about Carrington was that, while in life she escaped to the exotic climes of Mexico, at the easel she returned home.
*Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington is published by Little Brown